CONTRIBUTED EDITORIAL

A couple hours of downtime can do a lot of damage — just ask any major retailer or small business owner. It means lost revenues, loss of customers — and the permanent loss of data. Combine that with the estimated cost of downtime for a small-to-midsize business (SMB) — a staggering $12,500 a day — and you’ve got an invoice that few organizations can afford to pay.

Making a BDR plan requires your customer to take a long, hard look at their businesses, at their processes, software, and more. If your clients want to backup their data and services and then be able to recover them quickly if there’s a disaster, they need to know where that data is, what those services are, and to be able to priori­tize them.

While “Category 8,” the classification for the next-generation twisted-pair cabling specifications, is still in the development stage, the outlook looks quite positive that it will be specified to 2 GHz, four times today’s bandwidth of 500 MHz, promising a new copper speedway for data centers in the not-too-distant future.

Data protection and disaster recovery are more important than ever, especially for small to midsized businesses (SMBs), which are reliant on access to their data and applications. Even a few hours of downtime can significantly impact productivity, sales, customer confidence and reputation.

I tell people all the time that data protection isn’t really just about backup. It’s about restores and how quickly you can get access to your backed up data in the event of data loss. However, in some parts of the IT infrastructure, getting a backup in the first place is a struggle. And not one admins can win. By Jean-Paul Bergeaux, CTO, SwishData

FEATURED ARTICLES

Business Solutions Retail IT VAR Of The Future Conference, May 12-13, at Bally’s Las Vegas, will present an in-depth look at four topics: POS-as-a-Service, mobile point of sale (POS), Payment Security and EMV, and customer experience.

A couple hours of downtime can do a lot of damage — just ask any major retailer or small business owner. It means lost revenues, loss of customers — and the permanent loss of data. Combine that with the estimated cost of downtime for a small-to-midsize business (SMB) — a staggering $12,500 a day — and you’ve got an invoice that few organizations can afford to pay.

The cost for each day of downtime for an SMB is a staggering $12,500 1 . That is a price tag that few small business owners can afford to pay and is the reason that managed service providers need to make sure they have a strong backup offering for their customers. Even a couple of hours downtime could cause your customers to experience lost revenue, lost customers and the permanent loss of data.

Making a BDR plan requires your customer to take a long, hard look at their businesses, at their processes, software, and more. If your clients want to backup their data and services and then be able to recover them quickly if there’s a disaster, they need to know where that data is, what those services are, and to be able to priori­tize them.

Let’s get this out right here at the beginning: at some point down the road, your data is going to be in danger. It could be a machine error. It could be a virus. It could be a tornado the size of Nebraska. But sooner or later, you’re going to be in a situation where you’re at risk of losing some or all of your data.

Many businesses rely on partner companies to assist them with their technology needs. This relationship helps the business focus on what they do best and on what they understand, without the need to build an internal IT organization to support all of their tech- nical needs.

INDUSTRY NEWS

Bit Refinery, a provider of VMware and Hadoop infrastructure as a service, today announced the company is partnering with Hortonworks (HDP) as a technical partner having successfully completed the Hortonworks certification program

CHANNEL TRANSITIONS

The channel is always in transition, and it seems to be shifting even more rapidly these days. VARs are endeavoring to achieve greater profits and more predictable revenue by implementing the “as a Service” business model. In response, Business Solutions has developed an exciting new resource for VARs, MSPs, and ISVs.

Channel Transitions is an education and networking conference designed to help VAR/MSP executives learn how to best implement and manage the “as a Service” model. Channel Transitions will feature real-world, nuts-and-bolts, headaches-and-heartaches discussions and success stories on the transition.

MULTIMEDIA

Are Your Customers Really Secure Without Power Protection?
Editor Gennifer Biggs sits down with Minuteman's Bill Allen to talk about the VAR opportunity tied to uninterrupted power supply and extended run time if your customers have low-tolerance about network security, physical security, and disaster recovery.